Cassie hated to have people draw attention to her height. But that’s because she felt it wasn’t worth bringing attention to. She told me so many times that unless she looked at a picture of herself standing next to someone, she never felt any shorter than her friends. Cassie was a killer basketball player, a huge presence in any room, and, like her friend said at her memorial, a spiritual giant. She always felt the only times height mattered were at concerts and when trying to reach the top shelf.
Although, as much as she would say her size didn’t matter, Cass did really love small things. I don’t know if there was any actual connection between her smallness and her love of all that is small (it would have been insulting to ask), but I imagine it’s very possible.
What do I mean she loved small things? Let me provide some examples:
- Small humans (a.k.a. babies)
- Tiny homes
- Succulents for her desk(s)
- Pebbles and tiny pinecones from trails hiked on trips
- Kids meals
- Those itty-bitty bottles of shampoo from hotels
- Videos of people making tiny food in tiny kitchens
Tiny Gardens
While trying to come up with a 1-year anniversary gift, Cassie wound up getting pretty creative. She knew I loved plants and trees and gardening. She also knew I was always disappointed that we couldn’t have an actual garden while living in our apartment. So Cass took her love for small things, my love for trees, and combined them into one awesome gift to celebrate our marriage: a “Bonsai Tree Kit!”
The kit came with a bunch of seeds for 4 different species of tree that are relatively fast-growing (there was some other junk in the box too). Unfortunately, one of the species never germinated and two others died within a few months. The last one wound up dying in the winter… or so we thought! In spring of 2018, a seed decided to sprout up into a sapling after lying dormant for a year. That tree has hung in there since!
In Defense of Bonsais
There are a lot of misconceptions about bonsai trees. Some people think that a bonsai tree is basically a species of plant. Not true. Bonsai is just the word used to describe trees grown in pots (but most people wouldn’t call one a bonsai unless it’s been shaped too).
Other people think that only certain species of tree can be bonsais. Also not true. I have a lemon tree in a pot right now which I intend to shape over the next few years (provided it stays alive).
Lastly, some think that bonsai trees become less tree-ish by being kept so small. That is absolutely false. They still can flower and fruit. Bonsais still do everything their 60-ft cousins do—they suck up nutrients the same; they make oxygen the same; they grow their roots, trunks, and leaves the same; and they are still just as capable of displaying the beauty of creation. The word “small” describes them, but it does not define them.
Picking, Paying, Planting
Because of this specific gardening endeavor of ours, Cassie and I planned for years to go to a certain bonsai tree nursery in Kissimmee. For whatever reason, we never seemed to make time for it. It was not out of our way whatsoever. In fact, we drove by it almost daily. Yet we never poked our heads inside their gates.
This past week I decided to finally go. There’s some old proverb that says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today. I found that to be especially true in my case. If you’re wanting to cultivate a bonsai tree, a couple 2-year-old trees are not nearly old enough to do much of anything with. I had to buy a tree that was already several years old (but not yet trained!), that way I could do some actual work on it.
That work was really a lot of fun. I had to move my new dwarfed trees from their old, shabby plastic containers into new, fancy ceramic pots. This involved trimming roots of one, while brushing topsoil off the roots of another—for aesthetic purposes. After getting the plants all fitted and wired into their pots, I figured I should trim some of the longer, more unruly twigs from their branches.
Doing all this was, as Cassie would say, life-giving.
Tiny Lessons
What’s the spiritual import of it all? I don’t know. Maybe it’s that just like small trees are still trees, small people are still people. The value of a person isn’t measurable in any kind of physical sense; value is found in how much of a human they can be where they are planted.
Maybe it’s that we are all small in God’s eyes. If we believe that God is infinite, and so infinitely greater than creation—there really isn’t a difference between the ratio of a 6” tree to an immeasurable God and the ration of a 300’ tree to an immeasurable God. The same with people’s measurements—a person’s height from head to toe, net savings in the bank, breadth of his social network, number of awards on her shelf—outside our little bubbles, none of it makes us any better than anyone else . But our smallness next to God doesn’t mean we matter any less to God. I don’t love my tiny trees less than I would if they were big. No one loved Cassie any less because they was less of her. And we certainly didn’t feel like we suffered less loss because there was never that much Cassie to hold on to.
The lesson to learn here could be about different ways of growing. Bonsai trees never really get much bigger, but they still get older and more beautiful over time. For someone who stopped growing at 4’10”, the general consensus is that Cassie still grew in incredible ways.
I don’t know. You have a lot of time to think of things
while waiting on trees to grow. If you know what direction I should have gone
with this, feel free to let me know.
P.S.
Here’s some bonsai trees on display at Kew Gardens from when I went to London. Though I only briefly touched on it in my story about those gardens, I think it’s kind of amazing that God rarely if ever compares his people to flowery, fast-growing plants. The Bible is rife with symbolism that makes God the gardener and us his garden. But we’re almost always compared to unbending trees or to slow-growing woody vines. Maybe it says something about human nature. I don’t know about you, but I think stubborn and slow describes me pretty well.
